


Wilt and Bloom

by malevolentmango



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Coma, Established Relationship, Flowers, Fluff and Angst, Injury, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-16
Updated: 2017-02-16
Packaged: 2018-09-24 20:38:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9785138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malevolentmango/pseuds/malevolentmango
Summary: "He doesn't know what Hanzo's favorite flowers are. He never got the chance to ask."





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LeftHand](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LeftHand/gifts).



> As always, thank you to my beta [Tsoleil](http://archiveofourown.org/users/doctorqui) for being the _best ever_.
> 
> This fic was a "request" from [Lefty](http://mccrees-left-arm.tumblr.com/) on tumblr, who only asked for "Jesse and flowers," and got this angst-filled monstrosity for their trouble. If you'd like to "request" a fic from me, you can find me on tumblr [here](http://malevolentmango.tumblr.com).
> 
> You can now read this fic in Russian! [Looniko](http://looniko.tumblr.com/) over on tumblr did the translation and it looks great! You can read it [here](https://ficbook.net/readfic/5260634)!
> 
> The amazingly talented Omaano has done art for this fic and I can't stop staring at it! [You should stare at it too.](http://omaano.tumblr.com/post/160495965458/im-still-struggling-with-my-art-homework-and)

Everyday, Jesse brings Hanzo flowers. 

 

It's the only way he keeps track of the time passing. When the sun rises, he shrugs on the first tattered old shirt he finds, wanders outside to the garden behind the Watchpoint, and selects the flowers that bloom the brightest - the ones that almost look like they could never wilt. He doesn't know a damn thing about what they mean - which ones are for love, or wellness, or companionship. 

 

To him, they all just scream  _ helpless. _

 

He takes them to the kitchen, where he speaks to no one; takes a glass from the cupboard, in which he puts the flowers; takes the glass to the sink, fills it up with water. 

 

He takes, and takes, and takes, and no one stops him. They’re too afraid of him, the machine cowboy, awash in his selfishness. 

 

And then he carries his makeshift vase to the medbay and finds a place for these new flowers amongst all the others. 

 

There’s not much room left. 

 

They're running out of glasses in the kitchen. But no one complains, and no one clears the old ones away, and so Hanzo is a pale, fading vision against sterile white sheets, surrounded by life and death in a rainbow array. 

 

Jesse counts them, one by one, and that's how he measures time - a bouquet for each day since a small team of Overwatch agents returned from a mission, all living and breathing, bruised but surviving. All but Hanzo. 

 

He doesn't know what Hanzo's favorite flowers are. He never got the chance to ask. All the stupid, inane questions, he thinks, and that was one he hadn't gotten around to. He knows how Hanzo takes his tea (made by anyone but Jesse), and how he feels about the latest Akira reboot (awful), and why he always sleeps closest to the wall in the bed that they share (because for once, he feels safe), but he doesn't know his favorite flower. It's possible he hates all of the ones Jesse has chosen.

 

It's possible Jesse will never know. 

 

He stands at Hanzo's bedside, just looking at him. Wondering if he'll ever see Hanzo looking back again. 

 

And then he tucks the edges of his serape around Hanzo's body more snugly, as if the cloth alone will heal him, if only he wraps it tight enough.

 

~~~

 

When Hanzo wakes, it's to the scent of flowers and a flash of vibrant red.

 

It's a shock even to his incredibly dulled senses, the color and the light and the smell.  He hadn't imagined the afterlife to be so...excessive.

 

Then again, he also hadn't expected the afterlife to look like the medbay at Watchpoint: Gibraltar. 

 

He fades in and out, listens to the familiar voices around him. Mercy, talking about vitals and comas, about recovery, and perhaps he is not as dead as he first assumed. Lúcio, and the faint pulses of his healing songs. Hana, clicking her gum, the frequent pauses in the tinny music of her handheld game whenever she asks, “How much longer?”

 

And Jesse. 

 

Jesse doesn't say a word, but Hanzo hears him anyway. The jingle of his spurs. The whisper of his hands against the sheets, never quite touching him. The murmur of Mercy’s voice, “Jesse, please get some rest, he will be fine,” and his quiet, disbelieving huff.

 

He wants to ask what’s wrong. He wants to ask why he’s not dead, because being knocked off a building is typically the kind of thing that kills people. He wants to know why Jesse is so quiet, when Jesse is the loudest person he’s ever known.

 

The scent of the flowers remains constant in his hazy in-between world, the flowers and Jesse’s oppressive silence. 

 

Once, when he is slightly more lucid than not, Hanzo blinks his eyes open to see Jesse standing over him. He looks awful - beard overgrown, dark purple smudges under his eyes, his hat missing and his hair a mess - but Hanzo has never been more happy to see him. 

 

He remembers, distantly, the brief seconds in which he’d been falling, how he’d closed his eyes and seen Jesse’s face. It was the opposite of the way he looks now: Jesse was laughing, his head thrown back, fading into a deep rumbling chuckle that never failed to spread warmth through Hanzo’s bones. And then, nothing.

 

But this Jesse is here, and real, and Hanzo is too, at least as far as he can tell. Their eyes meet for a few long moments, and it’s like Hanzo is seeing him through a badly-focused camera - the blurred visage of a man distraught. And then Jesse finally speaks.

 

“Come on back to me, darlin’. Turns out I’m goddamn useless without you.”

 

He fades away again to the quiet timbre of Jesse’s voice.

 

When he wakes for the last time, the flowers are gone.

 

~~~

 

As soon as Angie gives the okay, Jesse takes Hanzo to see the garden.

 

He’d thought Hanzo would have forgotten the flowers that marked his days, until he mentions them one afternoon while Jesse is lounging in the chair next to his bed, telling him stories to pass the time.

 

“--and I told Mei, I said, ‘Now I see what you’re doin’ there! Don’t you sass me!’ She laughed so hard I thought she was ‘bout to bust a lung…”

 

“Did you bring me flowers?”

 

Jesse goes still, just staring at him, before he slouches further into his seat, pulling the brim of his hat down to cover the growing heat in his cheeks. 

 

“Didn’t think you’d remember ‘em.”

 

“I remember the smell. It was the first thing I noticed.” He can feel Hanzo’s eyes on him. “What happened to them?”

 

Jesse sighs, and doesn’t answer. Instead, he bullies Angie into letting him take her patient out for a little fresh air, and listens with a hidden smile to all of Hanzo’s complaining about having to be wheeled out to the garden in a hoverchair like “some kind of invalid.” The garden doesn’t have any chairs or benches, so he sits in the grass at Hanzo’s feet and leans back against his knees. 

 

He finds it easier to explain his obsession with the flowers - with finding  _ something _ that was within his power to do when he had nothing else - when Hanzo can’t see his face.

 

As he talks, Hanzo slips the hat off his head and runs gentle fingers through his hair. The action is so familiar that Jesse feels tears pricking at the corners of his eyes. He thinks of the way Hanzo’s hands had lain there in the medbay, still as death; how he’d refused to touch them, because he didn’t want to feel the absence of Hanzo’s fingers curled through his own.

 

He discovers that Hanzo’s favorite flowers are white chrysanthemums.

 

~~~

 

When Hanzo is finally cleared to go on his first mission since the incident, he brings Jesse a flower. Just one. Tiny and white, not a type that Hanzo is familiar with, but it will do.

 

He takes it to Jesse's old room, the one he hasn't used since Hanzo offered him half the closet in his, the one where Jesse hid himself away when he heard the news. Jesse doesn't look up when the door opens, or when it slides shut behind him, or when Hanzo's quiet footsteps echo across the bare room towards the dusty bed where he sits. In the end, Hanzo has to nudge his gaze upwards with a finger under his chin. 

 

He tucks the flower behind Jesse’s ear and smiles. They are both so very stubborn.

 

“This is not something we can hide from, Jesse.”

 

“Ain’t hidin’.”

 

Hanzo raises an eyebrow and looks pointedly around the empty room. Jesse blushes.

 

“Only hidin’ a little.”

 

“This is the risk we take. You know that better than most of the others here.”

 

Jesse purses his lips, doesn’t meet Hanzo’s eyes. Hanzo brushes his hair back, careful not to dislodge the flower.

 

“Yeah, I know,” Jesse says, a reluctant exhale. “Jus’...never had someone to worry ‘bout riskin’ before.”

 

“Then it is a good thing we are both so competent at what we do.”

 

He does meet Hanzo’s eyes then, and Jesse’s are a bright honey-brown, wide and brimming. 

 

He is no stranger to loss and mistakes, and neither is Jesse. But he is grateful for every day that he breathes, if only so that he can have the privilege of seeing these eyes again.

 

“I will not promise you that I will always return to you. Fate has shown that it would be foolish to do so.” Hanzo runs a gentle thumb across Jesse’s cheek. “But I can promise you this: I will never stop  _ trying _ to, for as long as I am able. There is nowhere else I would rather be.”

 

Jesse stares up at him for one long moment, and then he’s surging up into Hanzo’s arms and capturing his lips in a sorrow-tinged kiss that slowly turns sweet. Hanzo runs a comforting hand down the broad length of his back. Jesse presses in impossibly closer, as if to mold them together, like grafting two flowers to create a new one.

 

When they finally part, Jesse just chuckles. It’s one of Hanzo’s favorite sounds.

 

“Likewise, darlin’,” he says, breathless against Hanzo’s lips, “in case that wasn’t obvious.”

 

Hanzo smiles and adjusts the flower in Jesse’s hair where it has fallen askew. 

 

“It was.”

 

“But I hope you won’t be disappointed if I never getcha flowers again.”

 

Their quiet laughter is like a release, and Hanzo just holds onto Jesse tighter.

 

“You are welcome to buy me chocolates instead,” he says, and realizes his mistake a second too late to do anything more than roll his eyes at Jesse’s reply.

 

“Sweets for my sweetheart? Consider it done!”


End file.
